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The Form-Pleasure
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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The Form-Pleasure To address more directly the pleasure at issue, let us draw on an analysis from Freud’s work on the subject of aesthetic form. What is at issue is in no way a question of entering into a psychoanalysis of art. On the contrary. But it happens that Freud—as we will see, in spite of himself— offers us an invaluable resource.22 Freud establishes at the least a parallel, and at the most a continuity, between sexual pleasure and aesthetic pleasure (as we will see, indecision on this point stems from the underlying difficulty that he encounters). (Meaning at least—let us note in passing—that for Freud, it is obvious that aesthetics is a matter of pleasure. It should be reiterated that this assumption is not open to debate, on the condition that we agree on what ‘‘pleasure’’ means). The central element of this proximity between sexual and aesthetic pleasure—once again, analogical, or genealogical , or perhaps both—is found in the articulation of two types of pleasure, or rather, of two moments of the 44 T H E F O R M - P L E A S U R E same pleasure (this further hesitation also sends us to the heart of the problem) within a process involved in the lowering and ultimate release of a tension. On the sexual level,23 the first type of pleasure plays itself out across the progression of the scene of seduction, from outward attraction right up to genital orgasm. This progression brings into play three simultaneous processes, which are related to one another as in a contrapuntal relation—it retraces the path of the stages of sexual development from childhood to adulthood; it traverses different regimes of the sensible (sight, hearing, smell, touch); and it moves along the body, turning it into a succession of erogenous zones (Freud specifies that all parts of the body can assume this quality), right up to concentration on the privileged zone where orgasm can take place. The intertwining of stages, sensorial regimes, and zones acts as a combination whose ensemble composes at once a finalized process (through access to genital satisfaction, the relaxation and dissolution of forms) and a mode of autonomous functioning in which the inherent qualities of the sensible multiplicity are in themselves brought or brought back into play (particularly by untying the body from a perceptive integration turned toward ends in order to hand it over to a pure sensation of the self as body in the world, as body toward the other, as body to body). If the tension that characterizes the finalized process may be characterized as pleasure (which is not in principle a property of tension, as Freud specifies) this is both because it clears the way to the final relaxation and because this opening itself is made possible by the playing out of a sensibility that exists in itself, released from its operative or informative 45 [184.72.135.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:41 GMT) T H E F O R M - P L E A S U R E finalities—in other words, a sensuality, if it is true that beneath this term we understand a sensibility that exists in itself. It is for this reason that Freud can write that the ensemble of stages belongs legitimately to sexual phenomenon, while the fixation exclusive to one of these stages (to vision alone, for example, or to a single zone apart from the genitals ), stems from perversion, in other words, from the diversion [détournement] of the sexual purpose.24 We will not enter into these problems here except to point to the fact that all Freudian analysis thus rests on a double principal —that of a normative completion, in relation to which the rest is subordinate and instrumental, and that of a relatively autonomous valorization of assumedly preparatory elements and moments. Of course, the entire interpretive decision depends in fine on how to understand the expression ‘‘relatively autonomous.’’ This expression does not come from Freud. It goes without saying that for him the purposiveness [finalité] of ‘‘terminal’’ pleasure largely dominates the whole, and that, in general, Freudian pleasure has an end, in other words, a goal and end term (‘‘discharge ’’ or relaxation). As we will see, what remains important for aesthetic reflection is that, in spite of everything , Freud himself foregrounds the importance of the constitution of sensibility in sensuality, because what characterizes ‘‘fore-pleasure’’ [plaisir...